


After

by cat_77



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_77/pseuds/cat_77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has had enough sleepless nights, thank you very much.  [Spoilers for <b>The Great Game</b>.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	After

John lay still in the oppressive heat, the world silent save for the constant hum of the fan in his room, the air conditioner from the shop below, and his own erratic breathing. It had been months since the incident with Moriarty. Months. And he had yet to get a good night’s sleep.

He rolled to his side, the fabric of his pillow pressed against his cheek now a mixture of luke warm and damp hot from where he had lain previously. He closed his eyes and saw the damn pool again, his sheets a tight band across his chest and the fan a cool breeze against his skin. The voices echoed in his head like they had across the metal and water. Sherlock’s franticness a palpable thing, somehow the fact that his usually stoic and arrogant friend was so unhinged upping his own terror, making it all seem that much more real.

His heart beat faster, pounded against his chest, louder than the world around him. He knew what was about to happen, what should happen, what always happened.

“John?” Sherlock’s voice, loud against the silence.

There was a silhouette; a shadow of a man against the reflecting light.

“John?” the voice asked again, only this time there was a hand on his forearm, fingers pressed cool against his skin.

His eyes flew open to find a different silhouette, a mess of curls and knots far closer and the light steady from the hallway. “Sherlock?” he asked. His voice was not much more than a hoarse croak, but he needed to verify, needed to ascertain that this was real and true.

The hand drifted up to his shoulder, shook him lightly as much as soothed. “It’s over,” Sherlock told him. It was a promise and a lie.

“It’s never over,” John scoffed in correction. His voice was clearer, his heartbeat already slower.

He pushed himself upright and felt the tightness and pain in both his shoulder and leg protest the movement. He flopped back against the headboard as Sherlock situated himself at the edge of the bed, hand unerringly seeking out and massaging the cramp that had started to form in John’s calf.

“I suppose not,” Sherlock mused. He looked out the window, but not at John, never at John when he was like this. “Trauma... trauma lingers, you see. There are various terms and classifications, but...”

“Fuck trauma,” John grunted. He pulled his leg free and was not certain if it was his words or actions that finally drew his friend’s pale eyes to his own. “I have had quite enough trauma for this lifetime, don’t you think? I’m rather done with it and it can go fuck itself if it thinks it’s going to hold any more sway over me or my life.”

He rubbed sweaty fingers over sticky eyes and threw his hands down at his sides, waiting for Sherlock’s undoubtedly chiding retort. Instead, he got a near soundless, “I’m sorry.” Sherlock folded his own hands in his lap and continued, haltingly, “We can, of course, have the lease agreement seen to, though I recommend it wait until the morning as Mrs. Hudson can get quite tetchy about being awoken at this hour. I can help you look for a new flat; I doubt my references will be of much use, but...”

John stopped him with a hand to his shoulder. Sherlock flinched as though burned, but did not move away from the intrusion. “What are you nattering on about?” he asked, careful to keep his voice calm and cool and not at all gleeful that he finally got an apology out of the man as there were other things at stake right now.

“Your desire to leave,” Sherlock explained as if to a small child. “Though it is within your rights to vacate at any time, I do so wish you both take the time to make proper arrangements and accept assistance in doing the same. The Veteran’s Centre of course...”

“You really are not that bright,” John interrupted him. He removed his hand and used it to push his sweaty fringe away from his face.

“I assure you that I am quite intelligent, brilliant in fact,” Sherlock bristled. “You have told me so yourself on many an occasion.”

“And yet you fail to grasp onto a rather simple concept,” Watson corrected, though there was no heat to his tone.

“What is there to grasp?” Sherlock asked. He looked thoroughly put out. He also looked as though he was about to get up and pace. John made a grab for his sleeve, but just barely missed it as the other man rose to do just that. “You wish to rid yourself of both trauma and the memories thereof – which, by the way, the latter will involve far more than a move and may involve that annoying psychiatrist of yours, but I digress. This place holds not only the source of your trauma, but doubtlessly serves as a constant reminder of what you experienced due to associations this location has with certain aspects of said trauma. Due to associations made with me, because of the trauma I caused in your life.”

Sherlock paused and looked at John not with pity, but with something more akin to sorrow. John held up a hand to try to force his way back in and turn the monologue back into a conversation, but only managed a huffed, “Sherlock,” before the man was off again.

“It was not my intention, of course, which does make it that much more difficult to predict when such a happenstance could occur once more. I lay the blame solely on myself. I must have missed a clue, something undoubtedly obvious, which hinted at what occurred and what may occur again. Perhaps if I could re-examine the evidence, but of course there is none and it was my obsession with the evidence itself and not human nature and not the possible threat to your human nature that blinded me to said threat and...”

Sherlock stopped only because John hauled himself up off the mattress and into the pacing man’s path. He likely would have continued or rerouted his course, but John physically grabbed him by the shoulders and ordered, “Enough.”

“There’s no reason for violence,” Sherlock chided. There was a look to his eyes though, one John recognized far too well. Violence would be welcome at this point, something startling and shocking and breaking them both out of the depths and darkness that they had fallen into these past weeks.

“I’m not turning violent,” John assured him. He paused and felt the shoulders beneath his hands lower ever so slightly, though whether in relaxation or disappointment, he could not tell. “I will, however, be willing to resort to such things should you remain quite so dense.”

Sherlock made a face and even opened his mouth in protest but John’s raised eyebrows and tilt of his head to the side seemed enough to quell that urge for now.

“I have no intention of leaving,” John promised. He shifted his weight slightly, taking the brunt of it off of his aching leg. “As sad as it may seem, I like it here. I like the cases and the intrigue and the actually using my mind and knowledge for something other than bumps and bruises. God help me, but I even like your company, such as it is. I do not, however, enjoy the constant sensation of being watched, of knowing that mad man is still out there and that he has apparently set his sights on you and on me by default.”

“Some of the surveillance might be Mycroft at this point,” Sherlock admitted with a wince.

John did not know why that surprised him, so he pushed that aside to deal with later. He offered a terse, “Do tell him to tune it down a notch, yeah? I’d like to think I am the only one who knows what I do in the loo, you know.”

Sherlock huffed out a laugh and the tension between them seemed good and broken. He looked to where John’s hands still rested on his shoulders and asked, “Are you going to let me go then?”

“Are you going to stop being so stupid?” John retorted.

Sherlock shrugged away from him and took only enough steps back to be able to fold his arms in front of himself and look down his nose at him. “I am not stupid,” he insisted. “I simply jumped to the logical conclusion given the facts at hand.”

“The wrong conclusion,” John corrected.

“The logical conclusion,” Sherlock repeated. There was a hint of a grin on his lips though as he added, “I simply forgot to factor in that this was you I was dealing with and you are an inherently illogical creature.”

John mimicked his pose, not quite obtaining the looking down his nose, but managing everything else. His arms brushed against the sweat damp fabric of his t-shirt and made him tempted to take a rinse down shower, despite the late, or possibly early, hour. “I do try my best,” he said in as haughty of a tone as he could manage, earning another grin from his friend.

Sherlock loosened his stance somewhat and asked, in as honest and forthright of a tone as John had ever heard him use, “What is it that you want then? Obviously it is not escape from this life, despite the less than pleasant attributes it has; so what is it that you desire, what would make you more comfortable and put your mind at ease?”

John thought about it for a moment before he admitted, “Right now I’d like a rinse as it is too bloody hot in here.” Now it was Sherlock’s turn to raise an eyebrow, so John relented and said, “I’d just like a good night’s sleep, for a change. To be able to close my eyes and not see him, not think he’s waiting around every corner to try to off us if given the chance. To go back to our abnormal lives of hunting down killers and rapists and extortionists and the like and to not worry that they are tied in to something bigger that lurks in the shadows and tries to control us all.”

“There is something bigger that lurks in the shadows and is trying to kill us all,” Sherlock advised.

“Not reassuring and likely not helpful to obtaining sleep,” John pointed out.

Sherlock nodded and pursed his lips together, a thoughtful look upon his face. “I may have something to help with that,” he offered, fingers steepled before him.

“Is it legal?” John asked. He pointedly did not state such legality would preclude him from trying it at this point; he was, after all, attempting to be honest with himself.

“Does it matter?” Sherlock waved off his concern, seeing right through it anyway.

“Not completely,” John admitted, which was a testament to his current state of mind. “Though I would like to know if it’s something Lestrade and his team would find reason to arrest me for during their next random drugs bust.” He rubbed at his eyes and was reminded how desperately he needed sleep when the bright specks of light he saw began to swirl as well as flash. If he began hallucinating, he would not be able to tell if it was from whatever Sherlock concocted for him or from his own exhaustion.

“The components look innocuous enough that they have yet to be caught during his raids,” Sherlock told him, less than reassuringly. As an aside, he added, “Then again, with a squad as inept as his, that is not saying much.”

John sighed, and wished it was a yawn. “Did you ever stop to think they might not want to find anything in the first place?”

Sherlock looked taken aback. “Of course they want to find something, that’s part of the whole rouse. Unfortunately, it will be whatever they plant and nothing of my own, which means it will seem so startlingly out of place that the charges will never stick.”

“You seem very confident in this, as though it has played out this way before?” John guessed, not even bothering to hide the dryness in his tone.

“Perhaps,” Sherlock shrugged, completely unashamed. His eyes narrowed slightly as if studying John like one of his many experiments currently taking residence in the kitchen. “Go take your shower. By the time you’re done I’ll have something for you and this way you will have plausible deniability as to what it is and where it is kept.”

John decided that was fair enough and stumbled past Sherlock to do just that. He paused at the threshold and offered, “Thank you. I mean, thanks for, well...”

Sherlock’s eyes near sparkled in the light from the hallway as he replied, “Don’t thank me yet, you have no idea what I am about to do to you.”

John pushed that aside and realized he trusted that his friend would do no permanent harm and, if he managed to muck it up, maybe John could get some sleeping pills from the A and E.

He finished a brief though relaxing shower and changed into a new set of t-shirt and pyjama bottoms just in time for Sherlock to arrive with a glass of amber fluid and what looked to be two gelatine caplets. “Take these with this,” he was instructed.

Despite his trust, John sniffed it warily. He had a feeling it would do exactly as advertised, but there was no promise it would taste good as it did so. He could not identify it as anything other than “strong” and “alcoholic” though, even though he had tried a fair share of what was available in his time. As a doctor, he knew mixing alcohol and pharmaceuticals was never a good idea. As an exhausted man though, he was at his wit’s end and had tried each separate so why not combine the effort at this point?

He eyed the pills, but could not tell what they could be. Generic gelatine capsules with a whitish mixture in them that thankfully looked nothing like the pink-hued ones Sherlock himself almost took that time. He figured that, should they prove to be poison, at the very least he would no longer need to worry about nightmares and gave a mental shrug.

“Oh, do stop being so dramatic,” Sherlock huffed. “If I were trying to kill you I could have done so in far more varied and interesting ways by now.”

It was as close to reassurance as he was going to get and they both knew it, so John offered a quirk of his lips and a, “Bottoms up.” He tossed the pills into his mouth and slugged back half of the liquid, finding the burn far stronger than he had originally anticipated. “Wow!” he coughed, wondering if whatever it was would have knocked him on his arse with or without the pills and then wondering if the pills themselves were actually placebos before realizing Sherlock would never do anything half arsed and he likely just committed a minor legal offence.

Sherlock made a sort of half-wave and half-shooing motion and John dutifully drank the remainder of the liquid, albeit in far smaller sips. This time he could taste the subtleties of flavours and he made a mental note to ask his friend about it when they were both more coherent. He still could not tell if it was a Sherlock Special, or if had originally been brewed as such, be he did find his tongue chasing after the taste it left on his lips.

“Happy?” he asked, holding the glass out.

“Quite,” Sherlock replied dryly, accepting it. He looked at the bedside clock and compared it to the watch he wore. “I suggest you lay down. Though I could wrestle you into bed if necessary, it would be far easier on both of us if I did not need to.”

John raised an eyebrow. “You really think it’s going to work that quickly?”

“I am nothing if not effective,” Sherlock told him without a hint of humility.

John had to admit his limbs were already beginning to feel heavy and there was a sense of lethargy coming over him that had nothing to do with his current lack of sleep. Even his leg hurt less, he mused as he slid back between the sheets. He flipped his pillow over to the cool side as Sherlock adjusted the fan and said with as much earnest as he could currently muster, “Thank you, Sherlock.” He hoped his friend realized he meant for more than the drugs.

Sherlock turned from what he had been doing and offered a true smile. “You are quite welcome,” he replied, though for once it did not sound like a dismissal.

John’s eyelids grew heavy and he decided not to fight the inevitable and closed them under his own power. As he did so, he swore he felt a gentle hand across his brow and heard a voice softly whisper, “Sleep well.” He felt himself drift off and smiled, not even concerned when he heard the same voice add, “And I look forward to documenting your experiences come morning.”


End file.
